Blog/February 2010/Feb 5th

Feb 5th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Brrr! It's been cold this week -- getting down to just over freezing here in the Jerusalem area. Snow fell in the north of the country, and here there was lots of cold rain as well as some hail. The forecast for tonight is cold (down to freezing) but mostly dry; tomorrow it is supposed to be partly cloudy and warmer. We'll see how accurate they are -- right now, it looks gray and cold outside.

This week we finally, after living in the house a year and a half -- finally! -- purchased some lighting fixtures for our "salon"/dining room. Of course, there were several other places in the house needing fixtures, so we got some for those places as well. Once we got them home, it was my job to install them -- which, with a sore shoulder, is not fun. But B"H, we got them installed and running, and it is amazing just how much brighter the "salon" is with proper lighting. Now we have to paint ...

I didn't mention this last week, because I had forgotten. Several weeks ago, one of my "Facebook" friends became a fan of "Tommy's Burgers", in Los Angeles. If you're not from L.A., you won't know what I'm talking about, so here's a picture. It may come as a shock to some of you, but I wasn't always the upstanding religious man you know today -- and "in the day", I had been known to enjoy a Tommy's burger. So when I saw that link from my friend, the seed was planted in my mind that I wanted a Tommy's Burger -- but in a kosher variety. I mentioned this to my long-suffering wife. I may have mentioned it a number of times over the course of several weeks. Actually, I mentioned it enough times that she finally (in order to shut me up) examined the picture of the burger so she could emulate it. Then last week, the day arrived! She had made the perfect Tommy's Burger (kosher edition)!! But I was so overloaded from it that I must have forgotten by the time blog-writing time arrived. So now I'm trying to make amends.

This shabbat two seminary girls will be staying with us. We're also having friends/neighbors of ours over (the one whose birthday was last week). So hopefully all will enjoy our most excellently illuminated salon.

A former Microsoft VP talks about Microsoft's Creative Destruction. Interesting read from an insider. And another MS executive shows why the first one is right, by talking about requiring an internet "drivers" license -- no wonder ms is heading down the drain!

I recently read a technical-thriller called Digital Fortress, by Dan Brown (author of the "Da Vinci Code"). I'm not a good audience for these kinds of books, since I'm unwilling to let glaring technical mistakes slip by. It turns out I am not alone in saying this book is a technical travesty. There are three main technical problems with the book, and therefore the entire premise is faulty:

1. Complete misunderstanding of how secure a cryptographic key is. The usual 1024 bit GnuPG private key (2¹⁰²⁴, or roughly 10³⁰⁸) would take the "30 million keys per second" machine 10³⁰¹ seconds to crack using brute-force -- approximately 10²⁹³ years. The most liberal estimate of the age of the universe is only about 10¹⁰ years... you do the math. Of course, if the NSA has some way of cracking the underlying algorithm of GPG all bets are off; but brute-force is clearly inadequate. Even the 128 bit GPG session key (used for each specific message) would take 10²⁴ years to crack by brute-force -- longer, probably, than the NSA wants to wait. Current GPG encryption is effectively unbreakable (but there are other ways to get your information).
2. The notion that it is possible to crack a code without knowing what algorithm is being used. For example: without knowing which encryption algorithm is used, the code 23jfi30aSF!$Rwf could mean attack at dawn! or empty the trash (or in fact, anything else). There is no way to determine that one plaintext is preferable to another, absent knowledge of the cipher used.
3. The idea that there is not already an unbreakable cipher. One such has been known since the early part of last century, the "one-time pad". Hardly something the NSA would get excited about today.

In other assaults on your privacy, the various police are lobbying internet providers to install "backdoors" to get at your private information. Yet another reason to promote the wide use of encryption software.

The Swedish police stood idly by while demonstrating Arabs Arabs fired rockets against Jews. Makes you wonder how long Sweden will stand, doesn't it? And you in the US: pay attention to what fifty-four of your Democratic Congressmen just did. The road to Hell, and all that.

On a positive note, one of my loyal readers just sent me a speech given by Joe McCain in 2002. Somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain's famous essay Concerning the Jews.

This week we're having baked sea-bass with vinaigrette, a beef stew with tsimmes (the meat turned out to be very tough, so it's stewing as I write this). Also on the menu: "shnitzel", vegetable soup, homemade challah and various and sundry salatim as usual.

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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